Off the record: They’re not like regular bandages. They’re cool bandages.
Can first aid be… fun? We texted with Benjie’s founders about their recently launched brand and the reality behind making everyday bandages feel a little less boring.
In our monthly series, we text with founders about the wild, unglamorous, and sometimes unhinged moments that actually built their businesses.
Tessa Cohen and Sara Sebastjanska make bandages. Not the generic, drab ones, or the kind plastered with Paw Patrol characters. They make chic, playful, not-boring bandages. The best friends, based in L.A. and Austin, recently launched Benjie at Coachella, which turned out to be the perfect crash course in what happens when your product works a little too well. In this month’s Off the Record, the marketing pros-turned-founders share how bathroom guerrilla marketing helped them go viral, why selling out is less glamorous when your inventory is stuck on a boat, and the major lesson that cost them $40K.
Coachella-or-bust
Tessa & Sara: That’s right! We launched at Coachella 2026 because we figured everyone’s hot, overstimulated, dehydrated, and developing blisters. Felt on brand and a natural runway to spread the word (and the product).
Erin: You both came from marketing backgrounds, so I’m guessing this was not a “show up with some bandages and hope for the best” situation. What was your game plan there?
Tessa & Sara: Our biggest question was how to get in front of a ton of people without spending the entire festival awkwardly pitching strangers.
Tessa & Sara: So we made tear-off sheets that said “STOP RAWDOGGING YOUR SHOES” with an actual bandage taped to every tear-off. Then we put them in as many bathrooms as we could find.
Tessa & Sara: The thinking was pretty simple: if your feet hurt, you’re probably seeking refuge in a bathroom at some point.
Erin: That’s where you’d find me. How did this guerrilla marketing strategy work out?
Tessa & Sara: It ended up working absurdly well. People were taking bandages, sharing them, talking about them, and finding us without us needing to physically be everywhere at once.
Tessa & Sara: We heard some version of “Are you the bandage girls?!” or “YOU SAVED MY LIFE” at every turn. It was very surreal.
Tessa & Sara: We also made custom decks of cards with a bandage paper-clipped to each one so we could walk up to people we wanted to meet and hand them something that was actually useful instead of doing the whole “hi, we started a brand…” thing.
Tessa & Sara: We handed them to Leah Kateb, Jesse Solomon, Trevor Wallace, and a bunch of other influencers.
Tessa & Sara: Layla from Secret Lives of Mormon Wives rejected us, which, honestly, fair. Thankful for our beta blocker for making that rejection sting less hehe.
Erin: Rejection builds character, and also... her loss 💁🏻♀️
Erin: What I love about this approach is that while you were physically getting your product out there, you were actively using these moments to make content for your social channels.
Tessa & Sara: Exactly. The content from Coachella ended up helping us go viral multiple times on TikTok and Instagram during our launch.
Tessa & Sara: But I think the bigger lesson was that people are way more receptive to marketing when it solves a problem they’re actively having.
When selling out isn’t sexy
Tessa & Sara:
Tessa & Sara: Our collection “The Lovely Bunch” sold out in a day. “The Denim Edit” sold out in 5 days. Our other SKUs started getting dangerously low while the bulk of our inventory was still literally about to get on a ship.
Tessa & Sara: We immediately called our sourcing agent asking if there was any way to basically undo our logistics plan and airship more product.
Erin: AND??
Tessa & Sara: She could.
Erin: 🙌🙏😮💨
Tessa & Sara: It was expensive enough that we briefly questioned all of our life choices. But we did it.
Tessa & Sara: I think one of the weird realities of launching a brand is that selling out sounds really sexy until you’re refreshing inventory counts every 20 minutes trying to figure out how not to disappoint customers (or lose momentum) before you’ve even been in business for a week.
Tessa & Sara: We’re still waiting on some restocks lol. Should be soon 🤞
14 emotional breakdowns and $40K
Erin: How does one even begin to develop such a custom bandage like this?
Tessa & Sara: Developing our product was hard for reasons we expected, and reasons we absolutely did not.
Erin: How so?
Tessa & Sara: On the product side, there were a million regulatory hoops. Bandages are regulated medical products and not, like, stickers 😅
Tessa & Sara: But, honestly? Designing the product nearly killed us too.
Erin: Yikes. Do tell.
Tessa & Sara: We worked with multiple designers who were genuinely talented, but they just did not understand what we were trying to build. We spent a combined ~$40K between two different vendors and still kept getting work back that felt wrong.
Tessa & Sara: I think in the beginning we kept second-guessing ourselves. Like, they’re the experts, maybe we just need to trust the process?
Tessa & Sara: We learned the hard way that if you hate the direction, saying “maybe the next round will click” while continuing to pay invoices is not a good strategy at all.
Erin: Oof, that’s a good lesson, but a tough one to learn real time. How did things shift from there?
Tessa & Sara: Eventually we got much firmer about pushing back, slowing payments when things were off track, and being very honest when someone wasn’t the right fit.
Tessa & Sara: One piece of advice from Tessa’s father-in-law still gets repeated constantly: hire slow, fire fast.
Tessa & Sara: Would’ve saved us 14 emotional breakdowns and $40K.
Erin: 🥲
PR Boxes (From Hell)
Erin: Haha! What’s the story?
Tessa & Sara: We looked into producing custom PR boxes overseas, but two things kept bothering us. First, we couldn’t really get comfortable with the sustainability side of producing a bunch of elaborate packaging for what is, ultimately, a marketing moment. Second, PR boxes had started feeling really oversaturated to us.
Tessa & Sara: Bigger box, more filler, more stuff… and half the time it felt like creators had seen some version of it a hundred times before. It just wasn’t really effective.
Erin: So you went in the opposite direction?
Tessa & Sara: Precisely. We started making every box ourselves, customizing them to the specific person receiving them. Different references, different jokes, different details.
Tessa & Sara: Effective? Yes.
Tessa & Sara: Scalable? Absolutely not.
Erin: 🙃
Tessa & Sara: The boxes take forever to make, but people actually engage with them because they feel personal instead of mass-produced. They also tend to share them because the whole thing feels genuinely tailored to them.
Erin: What’s the craziest box you’ve sent out?
Tessa & Sara: Our most unhinged box was for Bethenny Frankel. It took four days to make.
Tessa & Sara: The good news: she saw it and commented.
Tessa & Sara: The bad news: we still don’t have her address.
Tessa & Sara: Bethenny, if you see this... CALL US!
Printing Woes
Tessa & Sara: Not slightly crooked. Fully upside down. We looked like rookies.
Tessa & Sara: We called Vistaprint prepared to explain that we were idiots. They were unbelievably kind, reprinted everything, expedited the replacement, and didn’t charge us for it. Won us as customers for life.
Erin: Shoutout VP 🌟
Erin: Did the orders get out?
Tessa & Sara: Our preorder shipments did go out two days late. Not catastrophic, but definitely one of those founder moments where you realize half the job is just making a mistake, fixing the mistake, and trying very hard to pretend you always had things under control.
Erin: Fake it till ya make it 🚀
Erin: This has been a ride, thank you so much for sharing these stories.
Tessa & Sara: Anytime!